


How the Light Gets In

by Beatrice_Sank



Category: Steven Universe (Cartoon)
Genre: Art, CLODS, Domestic Fluff, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, F/F, Gem Fusion, Meep Morps (Steven Universe), Nostalgia, but it depends on what you associate with fusion in the first place I guess, could be read as asexual characters if you want, highly experimental art at that, losing my nerves in the tags like a clod, somehow although trauma is alluded at, those two are far away from home but home is maybe closer than they think, though it may be murkier than that
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-15
Updated: 2019-02-15
Packaged: 2019-10-23 12:23:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,654
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17683358
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Beatrice_Sank/pseuds/Beatrice_Sank
Summary: A private and domestic history of meep morping, in which paint, tub pipes, dead animals and clods (clods!) slowly bring Peridot and Lapis together.Meep morps are said to be music done with things. Whatarethings to you, when you've been living in a world where your shape determines your function your whole life? When you've been objectified and lost your sense of self?Maybe a music you can still dance to with somebody else. There may be more than one way to fuse in this vast, frustrating, beautiful world. Everything you knew is so far away now, but in the end you'll have made something entirely new.





	How the Light Gets In

**Author's Note:**

  * For [silveradept](https://archiveofourown.org/users/silveradept/gifts).



> Usual warning: English is not my first language, feel free to point out mistakes and oddities.

Sun rises at 6.15.326, and sun sets at 19.23.456. She counts 236 225 158 451 512 stars from lying on her back, limbs spread like stalactites, in the pond that remains outside the barn from the inconclusive pool experiment.

378 days. It’s a fact, not some prisoner’s silly patience game, and her whole existence has always revolved around accurate data, so she doesn’t see why she should stop gathering them on the frivolous pretext that there is no superior to ask for them anymore. Besides, this landscape is showing every color of the required flowcharts and more, but in such a disorganized fashion it’s practically screaming for her to put it in order.

Mentally, at least. Steven exerted a ridiculous amount of resistance when she tried to sort his possessions by color, and that lion was nothing more than a furry menace. It refused to stand in its assigned square even for a second.

Sometimes it’s still hard, wrapping her highly-functioning brain around the fact that she’s here, on this… Earth, brewing in tepid H2O along with millions of clingy bacteria and nothing truly productive to do. She flaps her hand into the water, trying to grasp it even if she knows it to be pointless. Facts here seem to be of a different nature than on Homeworld, more… elusive. And people (Amethyst) dared ask why she was always so irritable (“You should chill out a bit, Pea pod. Why always be the hardest rock in the soup?”).

The density of most components on this planet is by the way entirely unsatisfying. In other words, everything is soft and mush-mush.

But no matter how uncooperative her surroundings, she’s a natural at that “adjusting-to-a-new-planet” business – and anyway 378 days is more than time enough for a functional Peridot to master a new environment. Floppy chunk by floppy chunk, she’s determined to understand this world, to map it, irregular and ill-conceived as it is. The exhilaration she gets out of it was surprising at first, and almost shameful, but she has it all figured out now: Public Enemies traditionally reveled in that sort of decadent life, having made the conquest of exotic, irritatingly lush planets, and they spent their days surrounded by starstruck admirers and awed pebbles. That drawn entertainment Steven and Connie were watching every morning now, starring what they called “galactic pirates”, really explained it all quite clearly. So, maybe she enjoys Earth, for all its flaws. But only because she’s such a rascal.

 

These days she dedicates her time to wildlife: she spends hours in the grass, face to the sky, pointing at every insect that flies by, saying their names with the feeling they’re under her command. Such tiny brain circuits; it’s no wonder they run in circle so clumsily.

« Moth. Fly. Another fly. Spider, now wait a minute I didn’t know you could do that young lady! Well I’ll allow it for now. You may proceed. Bee. Bee. Bee. Beeee… aaah aren’t you swarms boring though! Bee. Bee. Lapis. Oh hi Lapis! »

“Hey. Um. There’s this weird transparent thing that washed out on the beach this morning, and I wondered if you wanted to have a look.”

 

She’s been living with Lapis for 254 days. Again, it’s not that she’s counting, but she wants to be able to plan for that 365-days celebration everyone makes such a big deal of. Pearl even shivers whenever the subject is brought up. This lapse has no coherence whatsoever, it’s not even the accurate duration of a solar rotation, but after some trial and error she’s figured it might be the appropriate amount of time needed before she can give Lapis the elaborate meep morp she’s been working on for so long.

When she attempted to celebrate Day 6 of their cohabitation, the reception was more than cold – but she hadn’t quite uncovered the essence of meep morp yet, didn’t even know it might be what she was trying to do then. The interestingly twisted screwdriver that constitutes her first attempt at meep morping lies abandoned in a corner of her craft trunk, and she feels herself blush with embarrassment whenever she catches sight of it.

Celebrating Day 17 also was a bad idea in retrospect, even though she thought things were going so great in the barn: Lapis had uncovered an old oven, and so she tried her hand at “cooking”, in a misguided attempt that was undoubtedly prompted by spending too much time in Amethyst’s den listening to her rave about how “fab” food was. As it turned out, Lapis planned to use the oven as an aquarium and was rather displeased when she found her fishes bathing in half-burned Jell-O. She flooded her bed in retaliation and didn’t talk to her for the next 14 days, never noticing the blue jelly spelled her name in shivering, sticky letters.

Her third attempt, on Day 61, was more successful, if not resulting in a real celebration. She’ll admit she wasn’t so good at understanding Lapis’s reactions at that time. And maybe... maybe she still isn’t that good now.

 

“Elusive”. That’s actually a word she learned from Lapis, whose Earth vocabulary is more developed than her own after so much time being forced to listen to humans’ whining about their hormonal excesses or the fragility of their bones or what have you. She’s never said it out loud except once, very softly, to a particularly clumsy butterfly. It’s secretly her favorite word.

Fact: from Day 61, the day on which she fixes Lapis’s bathtub by levitating some pipes, they get along. That’s what she hears every Gem say with various degrees of wonder, and she really doesn’t understand what they mean by that. She doesn’t want to “get along” with Lapis. She… she needs to learn new words.

 

She knows Lapis hasn’t been doing so great all this time. She remembers Jasper, and how it was, working with her while feeling a little smaller every day because she couldn’t do this or that, because she wasn’t fast enough, because she was compromising the mission with all her new generation defects and glitches, her lack of power, her weakness. Imagine being locked with her in a very narrow space, no, even narrower, no space at all, not an inch, imagine being mixed-up, erased, losing yourself to someone like Jasper…

Fact: despite all her efforts and careful observations of the other gems’ delight, she still finds the idea of fusion highly unappealing.

 

When Lapis comes back from the surprise Steven organized for her on Day 102, and finds the set of old _Camp Pining Hearts_ rectangles (“Young pining hearts in the heart of the pine forest: adventure, rivalry, treason and romance. It’s maple-syrupy!”) innocently spread out on the mat of her bedroom door, she laughs a bit strangely. Like the noise the rain makes on the barn’s roof, gently tapping at first but announcing more, losing its regular rhythm. That stretching in her mouth is still a smile, though.

From then on, it seems, she begins to get better. Peridots are good at fixing things. So there’s a reasonable chance, say 52%, that it’s all thanks to her.

 

Even if it’s that's a clod thing to do, Peridot spends the days that follow by the pond. She doesn’t touch the water, just tiptoes around the borders not really knowing what she’s looking for. It’s certainly a Public Enemy Number 1 habit to spend so much time lying on the ground: she can’t remember a single moment on Homeworld when she wasn’t standing up, running to and fro.

Carefully, she looks up to the flowers that look a bit like sugilite, growing up anarchically in the mud (Pearl says they're called “iris” but she has more important things to do than listening to Pearl). A Peridot is very much a pattern gem : she thrives in defining categories, classifying likenesses (Pearl also said something about “botany”). Whatever that was, it must have been Classic Pearl Nonsense, because for all the stars she can’t separate the different colors she sees in the lazy corolla, colors she feels she knows but cannot grasp. She needs a name for it. She hates not having names for things. Those colors just merge into one another in what should be a messy cluster but ends up being… brilliant.

It’s only later that day, as she watches Lapis's back from behind her Inventing Desk, her wings shining a bit in the light that comes in from the cracks of the barn, all those cracks that creak at night and let mops in and those pale rays of sun filled with floating particles – because this planet is such a mess of course there’s always microscopic specks of uselessness flying in the air, – that she recognizes a pattern. The messed-up colors of the wild sugilites, iris, are very much like what travels across Lapis's fragile wings.

Maybe she understands that because, she reflects, Lapis often turns her back on her.

 

*

There’s a terrible pleasure, she finds at first, in destroying every object Peridot throws her way, after being an object herself for so long. There is no mirror on the walls of the barn, nothing to patch all the splits in the wood. She doesn’t look into the pond either.

This world feels so vulnerable, filled with more water than a Diamond’s tears, and now that she’s in full possession of… now that she can… now that she stands there alone, oh how she could hit. If she was interested, that is. But it would be giving this planet far too much attention, and to trap herself there more firmly. She refuses. She doesn’t care.

 

After she breaks her first gifts, she notices – not that she _wants_ to notice, but the other Gem is so annoying it’s not always easy to ignore her properly – that Peridot begins to transform them more and more. There’s the stupid pointy metallic thing that looks like a weapon. Then the unidentified burnt stuff. Then the glued dried leaf, singled out on its frame. And she keeps the old pipes of her tub, arranging them into a shape that reminds her of a failed fusion with spidery arms and no legs at all. Peridot chirps about calling it “Earth Logic” or something of the sort. And then...

“Look, I used those vertebrates’ mineral form to invent this excellent, ground-breaking, very new… meep morp.”

Slowly, she raises a deliberate eyebrow to what must be the remains of the three fishes who died in her aquarium since she started it, reunited in a star-like shape around which various flowers and small fruits are tied by the stem, making the thing a strange crown, or maybe a net.

“It’s… dead fishes. You used my dead fishes to make this.”

As usual, Peridot ignores the scornful ring in her voice and excitingly explains:

“I did! Isn’t it impressive? Oh I have to show it to the others. Imagine Pearl’s face! Ha! Who’s the best researcher now?”

She wants to kill off that enthusiasm, but today she can’t be bothered. She finds herself asking without conviction:

“What… is this?”

“I don’t know!”

She’s never seen Peridot happier about something, at least not since she asked about her opinion on _Camp Pining Heart_ _s_ ’s season 1 finale. It had been unwise to do so, but she really had to talk about the Pierre Situation.

“I think I’ll hang it above the entrance door and look at it until I can make sense of it!”

Inevitably, two days after this conversation, she’s still watching the damned thing as if it was about to teach her the secrets of the universe, hanging upside down against the wall from a window frame.

“You realize those plants are going to die too, right.”

Not that she wants to be part of this whole “meep morp” business, but all the muttering Peridot has been doing is beginning to get on her nerves.

“Yes!” Peridot spreads her arms in exasperation, looking a bit comical in her current posture.

“This meep morp evolves with time even though it’s based on one of the steadiest component this ridiculous planet can offer! And now it’s making me think about things! Unimportant things! It’s so frustrating and weird! Haaaa!”

And then, because it was bound to happen, she falls off her window directly into a pile of cardboard boxes, and Lapis can’t help but burst into laughter.

That’s how “Elusiveness” is created, and how she begins to pay attention.

*

Water was a luxury on Homeworld, sacred almost, a Diamond’s privilege. Lazulis were mostly used to manage it and maintain the private pools and saunas in functional order, while being unobtrusive and decorative like Pearls, even if they were closer to manual workers in pretty dresses. But when it came to colonizing this planet that was almost exclusively blue, the commanders decided to turn them into useful soldiers.

She knows all this from her mission logs of course, but it has always been uncanny, thinking about the innocuous vase-bearers suddenly becoming so powerful and ominous, so different from what they were designed to be. She doesn’t like to dwell on that, as she doesn’t like watching the Crystal Gems morphing into original shapes all the time, probably just to annoy her. But she found a spot recently, not too far from the coast, where you can extract satisfactory amounts of red clay.

Fact: there's at least 5 different angles in Lapis’s jaw when she's irritated, and what is she supposed to do with all these data?

 

Three weeks after she installed “Elusiveness” above their door, they discover a trapdoor in the attic they hadn’t notice before. It leads to a small closet filled with various, fascinating items and a lot of cans of paint.

“Oh my stars, imagine all we could do with these marvelous new resources!”

Lapis doesn’t seem too impressed, but she’s almost certain there’s a glimpse of interest in her eyes.

“Steven says it's mostly junk.”

“Junk? Aha, preposterous,” she comments, but not too derisively because she really likes that word, “junk”. She repeats it several times under her breath as Lapis searches the mess and comes up with several brushes.

“So…,” she begins hesitantly.

She interacts more these days, but mostly when they’re watching TV together, and she often stops herself mid-argument and retreats into her room whenever she becomes too passionately engaged in a debate about Episode 89 (“Best Beech Team”), or worse, Episode 174 (“Canoe Me Tender”).

“… how does that meep morp stuff work?”

 

By the end of the day, she’s splashed one of the wall with drops of purple, pink, yellow and blue, swinging her paintbrush in the air with wide gestures, trying to replicate the way Peal waves her staff when she fights or when she… dances? Pearl might be a knows-it-all, but she can move with a sort of precision and control Peridot always wanted to have. Satisfaction with her work only comes when the colors are mixed up, dripping together and forming small, iridescent pools on the floor. Something is missing though; she takes a step forward and carefully, carefully puts her finger on the biggest, messiest spot, tracing a single line that combined all the tints into a nondescript one. Her masterpiece. She feels like her gem could crack from emotion.

“It’s um. It’s something,” Lapis comments flatly in the back. She’s painting a chair, using only black and covering it entirely. On second thoughts it seems, she has begun to add flames on the seat.

“I think one should say it is all sub-jec-tive,” she articulates with confidence (she remembers the word from a long time ago, her first attempt at painting a portrait of Amethyst with giant robot hands).

“What does it do?”

It’s an automatic, professional question, one Gems ask so often in their life it’s not even considered making conversation. But she has a shocking answer.

“It's not meant to do anything. It has no use whatsoever”, she says, awed at her own impudence.

*

When Pearl comes by two days after their meep morping session, she does a double take in front of the giant mural.

“Is this new?”

“I’m glad you noticed,” Peridot says casually though she’s been standing still in front of the whole painting for the last ten minutes, clearing her throat.

“This is my latest, grandest meep morp. Admire the careful design! The adequate colors that make you feel things!”

“Oh I see. Humans call it “conceptual art”. It's very...interesting,” Pearl replies a bit haughtily.

“A ridiculous expression, very inferior to “meep morp”. So typical of clods. Ah, clods,” she sighs so fondly Lapis finds it very hard not to laugh.

 

Later on, after another couple of hours staring at the wall with wonder painted on her face, Peridot turns to her and asks in a small voice:

“Lapis?”

“Yeah.”

“Do you feel good?”

She doesn’t know what to say.

*

Some of her meep morps seem to call for something else, something more. As a purely scientific experiment, while Lapis is sunbathing on the roof, she sings to them hesitantly, trying to honor Steven’s customs. For “Earth Logic”, soft humming feels more appropriate, but the mural requires louder sounds.

“Meep morp meep morp meep morp” she chants rhythmically, balancing from one foot to the other in distraction.

“Meep morp meep morp now you just say words meep morps”.

Once she’s made sure no one is looking, she opens her arms and twirls, again and again until she trips on an abandoned rope and falls on her face. Music with things! That’s what it’s all about! Oh what a discovery, Lapis will be so proud of her, so impressed by her impeccable reasoning!

Trying to stand up again, she bumps into one of the latest creations, and Percy’s whiny voice resonates in the barn:

“I just feel trapped. I just feel trapped. I just feel trapped.”

Suddenly all the excitement from her breakthrough evaporates.

“Then you should have payed more attention in your knot class, instead of ogling at that mean exchange student from Camp White Beech, you stupid clod!” she yells at the old TV set.

She’s too busy running out to notice Lapis is back from her nap.

 

Her subsequent attempts at meep morping are complete, unabashed failures, and she rages at her incapacity, knocking off boxes of screws and ruining several carpets. The actual clods of clay are put away in a dark corner of the room.

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly why, since her stars count stays exactly the same once you’ve removed all the phantom lights from dead suns that still made their treacherous way through this sky, but she feels compelled to spend more time outside, especially at night. To think humans believe the patterns they find there are all for them, telling stories about their pitiful lives!

All of them clods.

Fact: Nothing in the sky makes any sense. She can’t even see Homeworld from there.

Still, when she squints it looks a bit like her painting.

Maybe it’s a rascal thought to have, but being here, stranded on that soft, mushy planet, gives her a hint at what incompleteness might be. She’s a perfectly formed gem, though a static one, and it isn’t natural, certainly, for her to feel she misses… She doesn’t know exactly what it is she misses. Not Homeworld per se, certainly not, but she might be missing something more unsubstantial than graphs, even more unsubstantial than castes (Garnet gave her a gemo-politic lesson after she apologized for having been offensive one time too many). Things like colors, sounds, the curving of the light around a planet of density 3.5 g/cm3. _Things_ (what has she become, using such an imprecise vocabulary). Feelings, maybe. There’s a very vague, very blurry part of her that is missing now, and maybe that’s why she’s secretly becoming more understanding of that obsession with fusion everyone seems to have developed here without the slightest concern for decency or practicality.

 

When she walks back in the barn, heading straight for her room, Lapis remarks:

“You will need to add water to that clay if you intend to do anything of it. It’s all dried up.”

“Whatever.”

*

It’s probably Steven’s fault, pestering her so much about friendship and how happier she looks these days, that she finds herself fidgeting with a light-bulb, cans and twigs to make something for Peridot. She doesn’t have much of a choice: it’s become a necessity, the other Gem has been so off-beat lately she can’t even hear herself brood. Worse, when she tried to cheer her up two days ago by offering:

“Someone should meep morp about what an utter scam season 5 was. There’s no word that can convey the right amount of disappointment. I would sink that ship with my bare hands if I could,”

Peridot only shrugged. It’s not that she cares (she doesn’t), but when season 5 doesn’t elicit a reaction, something has to be done.

Hung from a string, the light-bulb casts a small circle of light on the floor that creates an effect she finds both dramatic and a bit ridiculous. Perfect. She slowly forms several triangles with the twigs, weaving them together, and glues the whole structure on two metal cans. Something is still missing though. Panic washes over her briefly, until she remembers the existence of the revolting box of dead insects Peridot hides in her room, in what she probably believes to be a discrete and foolproof stash (it’s not: Lapis has tried on most of the human clothes that are shoved there). Why is she so nervous about this? It’s just a mediocre meep morp and she’s made so many of them already, she tells herself as she pins the butterfly at the base of the top triangle. There. She takes a moment to look at her creation. Well, whatever Peri thinks, this will have to do. She doesn’t see why she should bother more for a simple treat, not even a real present or peace offering, just a thing she could have made on any day, whenever she wanted. It’s nothing.

 

She stays there, having no other activity planned, and watches and watches and watches until she realizes something that never occurred to her before. This thing, ridiculous as it looks, preposterous as it sounds, wouldn't exist if not for her. She gave it its weird triangular form, she made it happened.

« It's me, » she whispered with some secrete awe.

She’s spent so much time as a mirror, reflecting everyone, everything except her own face, and then, stayed so long, so long under the… She tends to forget she exists at all.

It's me.

 

« It's for you, » she says casually to Peridot once she gets back.

It seems she will have to make yet another meep morp to describe the expression on Peridot’s face as she stares at the present like she’s just been offered a moon. After awkward minutes of silence, she begins to say, unsure:

“It looks a bit like...”

“I call it “Clods”,” Lapis hurriedly cuts off.

“Well it certainly doesn’t make any sense to me,” Peridot straightens her back with a dignified sniff.

After that she looks up, eyes so wide she wonders for a horrible second if she’s going to cry, and whispers: “It’s perfect.”

Then, for no discernible reason, she yells “WOW, THANKS!” and Lapis jumps so hard she knocks her head into a beam.

For the next hours she observes, amused, as Peridot, who found herself a small notepad, walks in slow circles around “Clods”, scribbling notes and muttering to herself things like “oh yes, yes I see, the round shapes complements the triangular ones so that the figure is balanced, an alliance of natural and artificial elements, how clever, this is an excellent, excellent meep morp”. The spectacle gives her a feeling she fails to identify. Something familiar though, a small instability in her gem that should be terrifying and wrong but only leaves her warm and comfortable. Funny.

*

“Off to work now! We need to convey the utmost tragedy of poorly managed romantic arcs. Paulette is nothing but an air-filled lava rock.”

“Okay, could you put clay in the basin? I’ll dampen it a bit.”

With the tip of her wing, she touches the earth gently, waiting for it to moisten. Then Peridot begins to poke it, tentatively at first, then harder and harder until her tiny fists are reddened and the clay looks even more shapeless than it originally did. The silence that follows is heavy with anticipation. After a while, Lapis says:

“You know, this sloppy corner kind of reminds me episode 256.”

“Oh that was totally on purpose.”

“Right. Let me try something...”

“Hahaha is that symbolizing Paulette’s terrible haircut from 224? How do you do that?”

In those moments Peridot can relate to the feeling of just being a shard of something bigger, something that isn’t the rise of a new kindergarten or the injection of a cluster, although her chest is heavy as if her molecules were splitting in confusion.

“It’s easy, look, just take my wing like this, and you put it right in the middle of the clod, there, and then you press it like a sponge.”

“Are you… are you sure?”

“It’s fine, come on, make something about what they did to Pierre!”

 

Fact: when she touches Lapis’s wings, it produces an electric current that tingles them both a bit.

Fact: once the surprised is past, they both find it rather nice.

*

One day Lapis finds Peridot practicing moves vaguely reminiscent of something she once saw on TV - she’s pretty sure it's called « break dance ». Not that humans break anything by doing it. A dance where you would get to break things as you go, she thinks. What a fabulous concept.

She’s not that much into breaking things these days though (the look of guilt on Peri’s face is almost unbearable). Meep morping is much better than any old dance.

It’s not something that she would casually tell – no one asked her anyway. But when she’s creating, transforming whatever material they find, she clearly sees herself, and the trace of her hand on it. And she sees Peri’s trace too, so obviously hers it’s almost shouting facts in a tiny, excited voice. Two prints, next to each other, mixed up sometimes and sometimes not, resulting in colorful metal nut garlands, monumental sculptures and even musical toilets.

A thought came to her the other day : this is a very Diamond thing to do. She remembers the human zoo, the private choirs of Pearls singing only for selected ears. Maybe what they were doing was wrong. On Homeworld, art was for Diamonds alone, just like the water she used to carry. But no, she corrected herself then: it’s not art, art is just a clod word.

She’s learned another one this last few months, and it’s secretly her favorite word of all.

 

“Peri?”

“Yes?”

The other Gem turns her head from the painting they’re working on, on the wall that faces the first untitled mural.

Lapis presses her finger on Peridot’s nose like she would with a button, shivering as electricity runs through her body, and says flatly:

“Meep morp.”

A green finger touches her left wing in return, repeating the word.

After a beat they both burst out laughing.

“Look at us clods! We have no use whatsoever!”

It’s truer than she realizes, Lapis thinks in wonder, looking around at the barn, and how it stands transformed by all the objects they conceived and rearranged. They have no use whatsoever, and yet, through the cracks their work made no attempt at hiding, she breathes. Steven’s right, she decides as she looks at Peridot jumping excitingly on a lid covered in green paint. She’s never been happier.

**Author's Note:**

> As you might have gathered from the tags, I'm a bit nervous: it's my first exchange outside my usual fandoms, and I offered this ship as a sort of experiment and challenge to myself. I want to say your prompt was so inspiring and helpful, it was a blessing to write: I really hope you like it!
> 
> Title from Anthem by Leonard Cohen (and in that respect this story was almost called The Crack In Everything), because without him I wouldn't know how to title.


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